Monday, March 05, 2007

Much better than Winchester Joe's swiming pool

This Saturday I headed up to my grandmother's place for a swim. She had a certificate for a couple of family swims at this private pool up near her way, in Winchester Springs (out in the country eh?). I had no idea what to expect, my oldest memory of swimming in Winchester was when I was about 8 and I was spending a few weeks of the summer up there with my cousins.

One day it was hot as hell and they asked me"Hey do you want to go over to Joe's pool for a swim?"Sure I did! Did I have the required 10 cents Joe charged for admission? Right here! So off we went to Joe's.Joe's pool turned out to be a small above-ground in someones backyard. Joe was the son and he and his sister charged the neighborhood kids 10 cents a swim. The duration of said swim was variable. If they decided you were done, they'd kick you out and you'd have to pay again. I think it had something to do with how much fun you were having. If you just kinda sat there quiet in the water they'd forget about you(the dead man's float worked too). There were no safety regs, there'd be as many kids as could fit above and below the water.I'll never forget the method of entry into Joe's pool. A rusty slide ripped off of the end of a swing set that had been placed so it's ladder was on the outside (of course) and the bottom of the slide was inside the pool. The feet were resting on a two by four on the pool bottom amid old patches that were evidence the rusty slide's metal footing had perforated the liner more than once. When you would try and slide down this thing (the first and only time) your bathing suit or cutoffs or fruit of the loom underwear (we were in the country eh?) would snag on the rust pitted surface and you'd get stuck momentarily before landing in the water amid rusty brown flecks of metal and pools of your own blood caused by the rusty lacerations you'd receive on the way down. Once in the pool you'd look up from underwater and have to find a spot to surface that wasn't covered in large green clumps of pod-like seaweed. On top of that, you'd have almost no time to do this because in the meantime. the next kid was making his rusty decent aiming for your back with his feet.

Ahh the country...

So with this in mind we were traveling on a dirt road wondering if Joe had gown up, moved the above-ground pool inside a barn with a wood stove, and was now charging 25 cents a pop for a bloody scrape down the rusty slide.

How wrong we were! I saw the mansion from about a kilometer away, it looked like the friggen Branch Davidian Wako complex the FBI set on fire in Texas way back when. It had an addition in the back that obviously had to be the indoor swimming pool. The water was as warm as a bathtub! It had a hardwood ceiling! Diving board! Woohoo!

Only $30 an hour for 15 people. It rocked! I didn't bring my camera otherwise I'd have a ton of pictures pasted on the blog. We're going again in a month, I'll take some photos then! It was a blast!

I am in the wrong business. I should have been a large scale dairy farmer!